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Friday, January 31, 2014

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center has conducted a national survey of more than 1500 parents of children ages 2-10 to find out how much of children’s media time is devoted to educational content, platform by platform, age by age. Learning at Home: Families’ Educational Media Use in America is the first comprehensive analysis of parents’ experiences with the educational media their children use: Which subjects do parents feel their children are learning the most about from media? Which platforms do they perceive as being most effective? And what are some of the obstacles to greater use of educational media? All of these issues are explored by age, gender, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. The report measures the degree to which children and parents use media together, overall and by platform, and looks at how this joint media engagement changes as children get older. The study also examines children’s reading behaviors, especially online or on electronic reading devices.

At a time when the global population of people ages 65 and older is expected to triple to 1.5 billion by mid-century, public opinion on whether the growing number of older people is a problem varies dramatically around the world, according to a Pew Research Center survey.
Concern peaks in East Asia, where nearly nine-in-ten Japanese, eight-in-ten South Koreans and seven-in-ten Chinese describe aging as a major problem for their country. Europeans also display a relatively high level of concern with aging, with more than half of the public in Germany and Spain saying that it is a major problem. Americans are among the least concerned, with only one-in-four expressing this opinion.

From the abstract:
This study identifies how the origins of higher education and In Loco
Parentis have contributed to a mindset in postsecondary education which
favors, in many cases, internal handling of campus crime and related
matters rather than the transparency the public and consumers demand.
The new era of student-as-consumer has ushered in the necessity that
postsecondary institutions provide honest and accurate information in
their Annual Security Report (ASR). Recent examples of post-secondary
institutional non-compliance with the Clery Act and the costly
consequences of such a course of action are identified and analyzed
using a systems theory lens combined with a multiple paradigm approach
to problem solving.

The immigration of skilled workers is of deep importance to the United States, particularly in occupations closely linked to innovation and technology commercialization. Appropriate policies and admissions levels for skilled workers remain bitterly debated in the popular press. The authors analyze how the hiring of skilled immigrants affects the employment structures of US firms. This focus on the firm is both rare and important, since economists typically study immigration through the conceptual framework of shifts in the supply of workers to a labor market; yet substantial portions of the US immigration framework have been designed to allow American firms to choose the immigrants that they want to hire. Young workers account for a large portion of such skilled immigrants; for example, 90 percent of H-1B workers are under the age of 40. Given this context, the authors look specifically at the role of young skilled immigrants within more than 300 large employers and major patenting firms over the 1995-2008 period.

Abnormal decision-making processes have been observed in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD). However, it is unresolved whether MDD patients show abnormalities in decision making in a social interaction context, in which decisions have actual influences on both the self-interests of the decision makers per se and those of their partners.

Abstract:
In a memory survey, adult respondents recalled, dated, and described two
earliest positive and negative memories that they were highly confident
were memories. They then answered a series of questions that focused on
memory details such as clothing, duration, weather, and so on. Few
differences were found between positive and negative memories, which on
average had 4/5 details and dated to the age of 6/6.5 years. Memory for
details about activity, location, and who was present was good; memory
for all other details was poorer or at floor. Taken together, these
findings indicate that (full) earliest memories may be considerably
later than previously thought and that they rarely contain the sort of
specific details targeted by professional investigators. The resulting
normative profile of memory details reported here can be used to
evaluate overly specific childhood autobiographical memories and to identify memory details with a low probability of recall.

Should paywalls stand between the taxpaying public and publicly funded research? Congress recently decided that the answer should be “no.” As part of the post-government-shutdown spending bill passed earlier this month, Congress included an “open access” provision requiring that research papers funded by the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education be made freely available to everyone within 12 months of publication in a scientific journal. This move is the latest step in a movement toward increasing public access to publicly funded research.

The United States and its partner countries are reducing military involvement in Afghanistan as Afghan security forces assume lead security responsibility throughout the country and the Afghan government prepares for presidential and provincial elections on April 5, 2014. The current international security mission terminates at the end of 2014 and will likely transition to a smaller mission consisting mostly of training the Afghanistan National Security Forces (ANSF). The number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, which peaked at about 100,000 in June 2011, was reduced to a “pre-surge” level of about 66,000 by September 2012, and is expected to fall to 34,000 in February 2014. The “residual force” that will likely remain in Afghanistan after 2014 is expected to consist of about 6,000-10,000 U.S. trainers and counterterrorism forces, assisted by about 5,000 partner forces performing similar missions. The U.S. troops that remain after 2014 would do so under a U.S.-Afghanistan security agreement that has been negotiated but which President Hamid Karzai, despite significant Afghan public a nd elite backing for the agreement, refuses to sign until additional conditions he has set down are met. Fearing instability after 2014, some ethnic and political faction leaders are reviving their militia forces should the international drawdown lead to a major Taliban push to retake power.

This essay lauds the publication of the Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies,
then turns immediately to argue that the journal must focus itself on
actively becoming the authoritative voice on mixed-race matters, while
also speaking out against naive colorblindness and premature
declarations of postraciality. This is crucial because the public
receives its information on mixed-race identity from the mainstream
media, which has a long historical record of inaccurate and damaging
reporting on mixed race. Using the recent "Race Remixed" series in the New York Times as
a contemporary example of this problem, the essay argues that it is
imperative that mainstream media writers seek out and use scholarly
input in the publication of their articles.

This site serves as a gateway to legislative histories that were compiled by the U.S. Department of
Justice (DOJ) Library Staff throughout the years. These legislative
histories were originally researched, collected and bound as paper
volumes by DOJ librarians and made available only to DOJ employees
through the Department's Main Library collection. Today, they have been
digitized and are now available for general use. The legislative
histories are composed of the most important components for the law
documented in each legislative history which may include some, or all,
of the following: the U.S. Public Law; House and Senate Documents;
House, Senate, and Conference Reports; House and Senate Committee
Hearings; Congressional Debates (Congressional Record); related Bills; and Presidential Signing Statements.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) is making the archival
collections of leaders in biomedical research and public health
available on its Profiles in Science web site. Many of the
collections have been donated to NLM and contain published
and unpublished items, including books, journal volumes, pamphlets,
diaries, letters, manuscripts, photographs, audiotapes,
video clips, and other materials.

Sir William Osler (1849-1919) was a Canadian physician
often called "the father of modern medicine" for the
central role he played in revolutionizing medical
education via the internship and residency system at
the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where medicine
was taught "at the bedside." As part of its Profiles in Science project, the
National Library of Medicine has collaborated
with the Osler Library of the History of
Medicine and the Alan Mason Chesney Medical
Archives to digitize and make available over
the World Wide Web a selection of the
William Osler Papers for use by educators and
researchers. This site provides access to the
portions of the William Osler collections of
the Osler Library of the History of
Medicine and Alan Mason Chesney Medical
Archives that have been selected for digitization.

Friday, January 24, 2014

Excessive alcohol use accounted for an estimated 88,000 deaths in the United States each year during 2006–2010, and $224 billion in economic costs in 2006. Since 2004, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) has recommended alcohol misuse screening and behavioral counseling (also known as alcohol screening and brief intervention [ASBI]) for adults to address excessive alcohol use; however, little is known about the prevalence of its implementation. ASBI will also be covered by many health insurance plans because of the Affordable Care Act.

CDC analyzed Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) data from a question added to surveys in 44 states and the District of Columbia (DC) from August 1 to December 31, 2011, about patient-reported communication with a health professional about alcohol. Elements of ASBI are traditionally delivered via conversation. Weighted state-level prevalence estimates of this communication were generated for 166,753 U.S. adults aged ≥18 years by selected demographic characteristics and drinking behaviors.

Source:Center for Disease Control Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR)

Two studies compared perceptions of status for occupations based on the gender and race of the workers. In total, 387 college students participated in this research. Across studies, results indicated that participants did not differentially value occupations based on the gender or race of the workers in terms of prestige ratings or salary estimates. However, participants judged that occupations required more education when described as having predominantly male workers rather than female workers. In addition, the participants showed different levels of interest in the positions depending on the occupational gender. These results are compared with similar studies conducted 20 years ago, in which participants showed more overt forms of devaluing occupations associated with women.

The purpose of this study was to examine the practices, traditions, and
religious beliefs that Jewish and Christian spouses are passing onto
their children. To further examine the strategies and approaches used in
integrating religion into their children’s lives, a total of 16
interfaith spouses were recruited to take part in the study. Subjects
responded to a series of audio-recorded questions covering areas related
to religion and childrearing. In addition, participants were presented
with a demographic questionnaire that assessed basic, measurable
attributes such as ethnicity and gender.
Comparisons amongst responses indicate that a variety of religious
approaches are utilized amongst couples. The religious strategies found
in this study ranged from instilling one main religion, combining both
religions, to incorporating very little religion at all into the
religious upbringing of the child or children. The sample size was too
small to draw any definitive conclusions. However, these findings do
have implications for future research on the experiences of Jewish and
Christian interfaith couples, particularly with regards to raising
children together

There is a growing public perception that intergenerational income mobility – a child’s chance of moving up in the income distribution relative to her parents – is declining in the United States. We present new evidence on trends in intergenerational mobility in the U.S. using de-identified administrative earnings records. These data have less measurement error and much larger sample sizes than previous survey- based studies and thus yield more precise estimates of intergenerational mobility over time.

Using the Annual Social and Economic
Supplement of the Current Population Survey, this brief outlines the
demographic and economic characteristics of the long-term unemployed and
compares them with their short-term unemployed counterparts. It also
describes changes in the composition of the long-term unemployed since
the start of the Great Recession. Author Andrew Schaefer reports that
the percentage of unemployed workers who were seeking employment for
more than six months more than doubled between 2007 and 2013 from 18.4
percent to 39.3 percent and that the long-term unemployed are more
likely than the short-term unemployed to live in urban areas. In
addition, the urban long-term unemployed are more likely to be older,
but less likely to be poor than their rural counterparts. He concludes
that, as debate about the extension of Emergency Unemployment
Compensation benefits continues, it is important to gain an
understanding of the long-term unemployed in terms of their demographic
and economic characteristics and how those characteristics differ across
place in order to help better target strategies for alleviating the
negative effects of long-term unemployment.

The global expansion of urban slums poses questions for economic research as well as
problems for policymakers. We provide evidence that the type of poverty observed in
contemporary slums of the developing world is characteristic of that described in the
literature on poverty traps. We document how human capital threshold effects,
investment inertia, and a "policy trap" may prevent slum dwellers from seizing economic
opportunities offered by geographic proximity to the city. We test the assumptions of
another theory -- that slums are a just transitory phenomenon characteristic of fastgrowing
economies -- by examining the relationship between economic growth, urban
growth, and slum growth in the developing world, and whether standards of living of
slum dwellers are improving over time, both within slums and across generations.
Finally, we discuss why standard policy approaches have often failed to mitigate the
expansion of slums in the developing world. Our aim is to inform public debate on the
essential issues posed by slums in the developing world.

Aereo and FilmOn X stream television programming over the Internet for a
monthly subscription fee. Aereo and FilmOn’s technology permits
subscribers to watch both live broadcast television in addition to
already-aired programming. Their use of this development in technology
has triggered multiple lawsuits from broadcasting companies alleging
copyright violations. These cases reveal not only multiple
interpretations of copyright law and its application to new and
developing technologies but also a possible “loophole” in the law, which
some have accused Aereo and FilmOn of exploiting.

Source: Congressional Research Service [via Federation of American Scientists]

This study looks at the impact of a cost-effective professional
development model in which teaching artists helped early elementary
teachers master arts-based strategies for boosting the oral language
development of English language learners (ELLs). Teaching artists
visited K-2 classrooms for 50 minutes weekly for 28 weeks. Student
scores on the listening and speaking sections of the California English
Language Development Test (CELDT) were used to determine the impact on
language development. The experimental group consisted of 267 students;
the comparison group consisted of 2981 students. The analysis of the
CELDT listening and speaking scores, fall 2010 to fall 2011, showed
significantly more improvement for students in the experimental group.
This research has implications for school leaders who, in times of tight
budgets, seek professional development opportunities that can assist
teachers in addressing the language development needs of ELLs.

The Census Bureau is working to increase our use of visualization in making data available to the public, and this gallery is an early part of that effort. The first posted visualizations will pertain largely to historical population data, building on prior work done to portray historical changes in the growth and redistribution of the U.S. population. For later visualizations, the topics will expand beyond decennial census data to include the full breadth of Census Bureau data sets and subject areas, from household and family dynamics, to migration and geographic mobility, to economic indicators.

Thursday, January 23, 2014

This research brief is a contribution by the Youth and Media team at the Berkman Center to its Student Privacy Initiative, which seeks to explore the opportunities and challenges that may arise as educational institutions adopt cloud computing technologies. In order to understand the implications of cloud services for student privacy more holistically, it might be helpful to examine how technology that is already implemented in academic contexts is used by youth and to explore how students feel about current practices. Towards this goal and informed by our recent research, the brief aims to make visible the youth perspective regarding the use of digital technology in the academic context, with focus on privacy-relevant youth practices, limitations on access to information, and youth’s relation to educators in a high-tech environment. The brief includes insights and quotes gathered through a series of in-person focus groups as well as data from a questionnaire administered to all focus group participants. In addition, it highlights in a few instances additional research and data.

The overarching study was conducted by the Youth and Media team between February and August 2013. The team conducted 30 focus group interviews with a total of 203 participants across the greater Boston area, Chicago, Greensboro (North Carolina), Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara. Each focus group lasted 90 minutes, including the 15-minute questionnaire, consisting of 20 multiple-choice questions and one open-ended response. Although the research sample was not designed to constitute representative cross-sections of particular populations, the sample includes participants from diverse ethnic, racial, and economic backgrounds. Participants ranged in age from 11 to 19. The mean age of participants is 14.8 (SD=1.96).

Thursday, January 16, 2014

We analysed 76 766 vaginal deliveries and 32 660 caesarean sections in California in 2011. After adjusting for patient demographic and clinical characteristics, we found that the average California woman could be charged as little as US$3296 or as much as US$37 227 for a vaginal delivery, and US$8312–US$70 908 for a caesarean section depending on which hospital she was admitted to. The discounted prices were, on an average, 37% of the charges. We found that hospitals in markets with middling competition had significantly lower adjusted charges for vaginal deliveries, while hospitals with higher wage indices and casemixes, as well as for-profit hospitals, had higher adjusted charges. Hospitals in markets with higher uninsurance rates charged significantly less for caesarean sections, while for-profit hospitals and hospitals with higher wage indices charged more. However, the institutional and market-level factors included in our models explained only 35–36% of the between-hospital variation in charges.

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

The Penn GSE study analyzed the movement of a million users through
sixteen Coursera courses offered by the University of Pennsylvania from
June 2012 to June 2013. The project aimed to identify key transition
points for users – such as when users enter and leave courses – as well
as when and how users participate in the courses. The study also
considered how engagement and persistence vary based on various course
characteristics. The courses studied ranged widely in topic, target
audience, length of study, instructional time, use of quizzes and
assignment of homework, and other dimensions. While a few courses were
oriented toward college preparation (e.g., “Calculus: Single Variable”),
most focused on occupational skills (e.g., “Cardiac Arrest,
Resuscitation Science, and Hypothermia”) or were geared toward personal
enrichment (e.g., “Greek and Roman Mythology”).

A common but understudied argument is that the reorganization of work has contributed to the deterioration of labor standards in the US over the past four decades. Yet an analysis of existing aggregate data does not show a strong, unambiguous increase in key measures of nonstandard work. This paper therefore identifies data gaps and research questions that need to be answered, in order to better understand trends in workplace restructuring during the era of growing wage inequality.

Source: Bernhardt, Annette. (2014). Labor Standards and the Reorganization of Work: Gaps in Data and Research. UC Berkeley: Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. Retrieved from: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/3hc6t3d5

As the clarification and development of neurophysiological biomarkers continues,
shifts in our approach to diagnosis and treatment decisions should follow. After all, the success of precision medicine lies within these neuroscientific advances, and will likely be the roadmap to a next-generation brain-based Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

This paper takes a close look at the reasons, procedures, and results of
cluster identification methods. Despite being a popular research topic
in strategy, economics, and sociology, geographic clusters are often
studied with little consideration given to the underlying economic
activities, the unique cluster boundaries, or the appropriate benchmark
of economic concentration. Our goal is to increase awareness of the
complexities behind cluster identification and to provide concrete
insights and methodologies applicable to various empirical settings. The
organic cluster identification methodology we propose is especially
useful when researchers work in global settings where data available at
different geographic units complicates comparisons across countries.

At the highest level of description, this book is about data mining.
However, it focuses on data mining of very large amounts of data, that
is, data so large it does not ﬁt in main memory. Because of the emphasis
on size, many of our examples are about the Web or data derived from
the Web. Further, the book takes an algorithmic point of view: data
mining is about applying algorithms to data, rather than using data to
“train” a machine-learning engine of some sort.

Abstract:
Americans’ indebtedness has increased dramatically since the 1980s – a
trend likely to have important implications for retirement security.
This study finds that older adults with debt are 8 percentage points
more likely to work and 2 percentage points less likely to receive
Social Security benefits than those without debt. Not only does the
presence of debt influence older adults’ behavior, but so do the amount
and type of debt – particularly outstanding mortgages. Increasingly,
retirement security will depend on having enough income and assets to
pay for basic living expenses and to service debt.

The share of countries with a high or very high level of social hostilities involving religion reached a six-year peak in 2012, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center. A third (33%) of the 198 countries and territories included in the study had high religious hostilities in 2012, up from 29% in 2011 and 20% as of mid-2007. Religious hostilities increased in every major region of the world except the Americas. The sharpest increase was in the Middle East and North Africa, which still is feeling the effects of the 2010-11 political uprisings known as the Arab Spring.1 There also was a significant increase in religious hostilities in the Asia-Pacific region, where China edged into the “high” category for the first time.

In 2008-10, 16.5 million civilian men nationwide age 18-44 lived in
families with incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty level; 15
million of these men lacked college degrees. Low-income men are more
likely to have never married than men the same age nationwide, and they
are disproportionately African American or Hispanic. Using data from the
American Community Survey, this brief presents estimates of the number
of low-income men in the 50 states and the District of Columbia,
focusing on metropolitan areas with at least 50,000 low-income men.

In this paper we focus on the connection between age and language use,
exploring age prediction of Twitter users based on their tweets. We
discuss the construction of a fine-grained annotation effort to assign
ages and life stages to Twitter users. Using this dataset, we explore
age prediction in three different ways: classifying users into age
categories, by life stages, and predicting their exact age. We find that
an automatic system achieves better performance than humans on these
tasks and that both humans and the automatic systems have difficulties
predicting the age of older people. Moreover, we present a detailed
analysis of variables that change with age. We find strong patterns of
change, and that most changes occur at young ages.

Abstract:
This paper explores how specific media images affect adolescent
attitudes and outcomes. The specific context examined is the widely
viewed MTV franchise, 16 and Pregnant, a series of reality TV shows
including the Teen Mom sequels, which follow the lives of pregnant
teenagers during the end of their pregnancy and early days of
motherhood. We investigate whether the show influenced teens’ interest
in contraceptive use or abortion, and whether it ultimately altered teen
childbearing outcomes. We use data from Google Trends and Twitter to
document changes in searches and tweets resulting from the show, Nielsen
ratings data to capture geographic variation in viewership, and Vital
Statistics birth data to measure changes in teen birth rates. We find
that 16 and Pregnant led to more searches and tweets regarding birth
control and abortion, and ultimately led to a 5.7 percent reduction in
teen births in the 18 months following its introduction. This accounts
for around one-third of the overall decline in teen births in the United
States during that period.

While lopsided majorities of Hispanics and Asian Americans support
creating a pathway to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants, two new
surveys from the Pew Research Center also show that these groups believe
it is more important for unauthorized immigrants to get relief from the
threat of deportation.

By 55% to 35%, Hispanics say that they think being able to live and
work in the United States legally without the threat of deportation is
more important for unauthorized immigrants than a pathway to
citizenship. Asian Americans hold a similar view, albeit by a smaller
margin—49% to 44%.

Together Hispanics and Asian Americans account for two-thirds of the 28 million immigrants who are in the U.S. legally,1
and Hispanics alone account for about three-quarters of the additional
11.7 million immigrants who, according to Pew Research Center estimates,
are in the country illegally.